Gangsta Rap and American Culture by Michael Eric Dyson The recent attacks on the entertainment industry, especially gangsta rap, by Senator Bob Dole, for- mer Education Secretary William Bennett, and political activist C. Delores Tucker, reveal the fury that popular culture can evoke in a wide range of commentators. As a thirty-five-year-old father of a sixteen year-old son and as a professor and ordained Baptist minister who grew up in Detroit's treacherous inner city, I too am dis- turbed by many elements of gangsta rap. But I'm equally anguished by the way many critics have used its artists as scapegoats. How can we avoid the pitfall of unfairly attacking black youth for problems that bewitched our culture long before
Gangsta Rap and American Culture
Mar 17, 2023
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Gangsta Rap and American CultureThe recent attacks on the entertainment industry,
especially gangsta rap, by Senator Bob Dole, for-
mer Education Secretary William Bennett, and
political activist C. Delores Tucker, reveal the fury
that popular culture can evoke in a wide range of
commentators. As a thirty-five-year-old father of a
sixteen year-old son and as a professor and
ordained Baptist minister who grew up in
Detroit's treacherous inner city, I too am dis-
turbed by many elements of gangsta rap. But I'm
equally anguished by the way many critics have
used its artists as scapegoats. How can we avoid
the pitfall of unfairly attacking black youth for
problems that bewitched our culture long before
Gangsta Rap and American Culture
they gained prominence? First, we should understand what forces drove the emergence of rap. Second, we should place the debate about gangsta rap in the context of a much older debate about "negative" and "positive" black images. Finally, we should acknowledge that gangsta rap crudely exposes harmful beliefs and practices that are often maintained with deceptive civility in much of mainstream society, including many black communities.
If the fifteen-year evolution of hip-hop teaches us any- thing, it's that history is made in unexpected ways by unex- pected people with unexpected results. Rap is now safe from the perils of quick extinction predicted at its humble start. But its birth in the bitter belly of the 70s proved to be a Rosetta stone of black popular culture. Afros, "blunts," funk music, and carnal eruptions define a "back-in-the-day" hip-hop aesthetic. In reality, the severe 70s busted the economic boom of the '60s. The fallout was felt in restructured automobile industries and collapsed steel mills. It was extended in exported employment to foreign markets. Closer to home, there was the depletion of social services to reverse the material ruin of black life. Later, public spaces for black recreation were gutted by Reaganomics or violently transformed by lethal drug economies.
Hip-hop was born in these bleak conditions. Hip-hoppers joined pleasure and rage while turning the details of their dif- ficult lives into craft and capital. This is the world hip-hop would come to "represent": privileged persons speaking for less visible or vocal peers. At their best, rappers shape the tortuous twists of urban fate into lyrical elegies. They repre- sent lives swallowed by too little love or opportunity. They represent themselves and their peers with aggrandizing anthems that boast of their ingenuity and luck in surviving. The art of "representin'" that is much ballyhooed in hip-hop is the witness of those left to tell the afflicted s story.
As rap expands its vision and influence, its unfavorable ori- gins and its relentless quest to represent black youth are both
177
178 SONGS OF CELEBRATION
a consolation and challenge to hip-hoppers. They remind rappers that history is not merely the stuff of imperial dreams from above. It isn't just the sanitizing myths of those with political power. Representing history is within reach of those who seize the opportunity to speak for themselves, to repre- sent their own interests at all costs. Even raps largest con- troversies are about representation. Hip-hops attitudes toward women and gays continually jolt in the unvarnished malevolence they reveal. The sharp responses to rap s misog- yny and homophobia signify its central role in battles over the cultural representation of other beleaguered groups. This is particularly true of gangsta rap.
While gangsta rap takes the heat for a range of social mal- adies from urban violence to sexual misconduct, the roots of our racial misery remain buried beneath moralizing dis- course that is confused and sometimes dishonest. There's no doubt that gangsta rap is often sexist and that it reflects a vicious misogyny that has seized our nation with frightening intensity. It is doubly wounding for black women who are already beset by attacks from outside their communities to feel the thrust of musical daggers to their dignity from within. How painful it is for black women, many of whom have fought valiantly for black pride, to hear the dissonant chord of disdain carried in the angry epithet "bitch."
The link between the vulgar rhetorical traditions expressed in gangsta rap and the economic exploitation that dominates the marketplace is real. The circulation of brutal images of black men as sexual outlaws and black females as "'ho s" in many gangsta rap narratives mirrors ancient stereo- types of black sexual identity. Male and female bodies are turned into commodities. Black sexual desire is stripped of redemptive uses in relationships of great affection or love.
gangsta rappers, however, don't merely respond to the val- ues and visions of the marketplace; they help shape them as well. The ethic of consumption that pervades our culture cer- tainly supports the rapacious materialism shot through the
Gangsta Rap and American Culture 179
narratives of gangsta rap. Such an ethic, however, does not exhaust the literal or metaphoric purposes of material wealth in gangsta culture. The imagined and real uses of money to help one's friends, family, and neighborhood occupies a prominent spot in gangsta rap lyrics and lifestyles.
Equally troubling is the glamorization of violence and the romanticization of the culture of guns that pervades gangsta rap. The recent legal troubles of Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and other gangsta rappers chastens any defense of the genre based on simplistic claims that these artists are merely performing roles that are divorced from real life. Too often for gangsta rappers, life does indeed imi- tate and inform art.
But gangsta rappers aren't simply caving in to the pressure of racial stereotyping and its economic rewards in a music industry hungry to exploit their artistic imaginations. Accord- ing to this view, gangsta rappers are easily manipulated pawns in a chess game of material dominance where their consciences are sold to the highest bidder. Or else gangsta rappers are viewed as the black face of white desire to distort the beauty of black life. Some critics even suggest that white record executives discourage the production of "positive rap" and reinforce the desire for lewd expressions packaged as cultural and racial authenticity.
But such views are flawed. The street between black artists and record companies runs both ways. Even though black artists are often ripe for the picking—and thus suscep- tible to exploitation by white and black record labels—many of them are quite sophisticated about the politics of cultural representation. Many gangsta rappers helped to create the genres artistic rules. Further, they have figured out how to financially exploit sincere and sensational interest in "ghetto life." gangsta rap is no less legitimate because many "gangstas" turn out to be middle-class blacks faking home boy roots. This fact simply focuses attention on the genres essential constructedness, its literal artifice. Much of gangsta
180 SONGS OF CELEBRATION
rap makes voyeuristic whites and naive blacks think they're getting a slice of authentic ghetto life when in reality they're being served colorful exaggerations. That doesn't mean, how- ever, that the best of gangsta rappers don't provide com- pelling portraits of real social and economic suffering.
Critics of gangsta rap often ignore how hip-hop has been developed without the assistance of a majority of black com- munities. Even "positive" or "nation-conscious" rap was ini- tially spurned by those now calling for its revival in the face of gangsta rap s ascendancy. Long before white record exec- utives sought to exploit transgressive sexual behavior among blacks, many of us failed to lend support to politically moti- vated rap. For instance, when political rap group Public Enemy was at its artistic and popular height, most of the crit- ics of gangsta rap didn't insist on the group’s prominence in black cultural politics. Instead, Public Enemy and other con- scientious rappers were often viewed as controversial figures whose inflammatory racial rhetoric was cause for caution or alarm. In this light, the hue and cry directed against gangsta rap by the new defenders of "legitimate" hip-hop rings false.
Also, many critics of gangsta rap seek to curtail its artistic freedom to transgress boundaries defined by racial or sexual taboo. That's because the burden of representation falls heavily on what may be termed the race artist in a far differ- ent manner than the one I've described above. The race artist stands in for black communities. She represents mil- lions of blacks by substituting or sacrificing her desires and visions for the perceived desires and visions of the masses. Even when the race artist manages to maintain relative inde- pendence of vision, his or her work is overlaid with, and interpreted within, the social and political aspirations of blacks as a whole. Why? Because of the appalling lack of redeeming or nonstereotypical representations of black life that are permitted expression in our culture.
This situation makes it difficult for blacks to affirm the value of nontraditional or transgressive artistic expressions.
Gangsta Rap and American Culture 181
Instead of viewing such cultural products through critical eyes—seeing the good and the bad, the productive and destructive aspects of such art—many blacks tend to simply dismiss such work with hypercritical disdain. A suffocating standard of "legitimate" art is thus produced by the limited public availability of complex black art. Either art is seen as redemptive because it uplifts black culture and shatters stereotypical thinking about blacks, or it is seen as bad because it reinforces negative perceptions of black culture.
That is too narrow a measure for the brilliance and variety of black art and cultural imagination. Black folk should surely pay attention to how black art is perceived in our culture. We must be mindful of the social conditions that shape percep- tions of our cultural expressions and that stimulate the flour- ishing of one kind of art versus another. (After all, die-hard hip-hop fans have long criticized how gangsta rap is eagerly embraced by white record companies while "roots" hip-hop is grossly underfinanced.)
But black culture is too broad and intricate—its artistic manifestations too unpredictable and challenging—for us to be obsessed with how white folk view our culture through the lens of our art. And black life is too differentiated by class, sexual identity, gender, region, and nationality to fixate on "negative" or "positive" representations of black culture. Black culture is good and bad, uplifting and depressing, edi- fying and stifling. All of these features should be represented in our art, should find resonant voicing in the diverse tongues of black cultural expressions.
gangsta rappers are not the first to face the grueling dou- ble standards imposed on black artists. Throughout African-American history, creative personalities have sought to escape or enliven the role of race artist with varying degrees of success. The sharp machismo with which many gangsta rappers reject this office grates on the nerves of many traditionalists. Many critics argue that since gangsta rap is often the only means by which many white Americans come into
182
contact with black life, its pornographic representations and brutal stereotypes of black culture are especially harmful. The understandable but lamentable response of many critics is to condemn gangsta rap out of hand. They aim to suppress gangsta rap's troubling expressions rather than critically engage its artists and the provocative issues they address. Or the critics of gangsta rap use it for narrow political ends that fail to enlighten or better our common moral lives.
Tossing a moralizing /accuse at the entertainment indus- try may have boosted Bob Dole s standing in the polls over the short term. It did little, however, to clarify or correct the problems to which he has drawn dramatic attention. I'm in favor of changing the moral climate of our nation. I just don't believe that attacking movies, music, and their makers is very helpful. Besides, right-wing talk radio hosts wreak more havoc than a slew of violent films. They're the ones terrorist Timothy McVeigh was inspired by as he planned to bomb the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
A far more crucial task lies in getting at what's wrong with our culture and what it needs to get right. Nailing the obvi- ous is easy. That's why Dole, along with William Bennett and C. Delores Tucker, goes after popular culture, especially gangsta rap. And the recent attempts of figures like Tucker and Dionne Warwick, as well as national and local lawmak- ers, to censor gangsta rap or to outlaw its sale to minors are surely misguided. When I testified before the U.S. Senates Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, as well as the Pennsylva- nia House of Representatives, I tried to make this point while acknowledging the need to responsibly confront gangsta rap s problems. Censorship of gangsta rap cannot begin to solve the problems of poor black youth. Nor will it effectively cur- tail their consumption of music that is already circulated through dubbed tapes and without the benefit of significant airplay.
A crucial distinction needs to be made between censor- ship of gangsta rap and edifying expressions of civic respon-
Gangsta Rap and American Culture 183
sibility and community conscientiousness. The former seeks to prevent the sale of vulgar music that offends mainstream moral sensibilities by suppressing the First Amendment. The latter, however, is a more difficult but rewarding task. It seeks to oppose the expression of misogynistic and sexist senti- ments in hip-hop culture through protest and pamphleteer- ing, through community activism, and through boycotts and consciousness raising.
What Dole, Bennett, and Tucker shrink from helping us understand—and what all effective public moralists must address—is why this issue now? Dole's answer is that the loss of family values is caused by the moral corruption of popular culture, and therefore we should hold rap artists, Hollywood moguls, and record executives responsible for our moral chaos. Its hard to argue with Dole on the surface, but a gentle scratch reveals that both his analysis and answer are flawed.
Too often, "family values" is a code for a narrow view of how families work, who gets to count as a legitimate domes- tic unit, and consequently, what values are crucial to their livelihood. Research has shown that nostalgia for the family of the past, when father knew best, ignores the widespread problems of those times, including child abuse and misogyny. Romantic portrayals of the family on television and the big screen, anchored by the myth of the Benevolent Patriarch, hindered our culture from coming to grips with its ugly domestic problems.
To be sure, there have been severe assaults on American families and their values, but they have not come mainly from Hollywood, but from Washington with the dismantling of the Great Society. Cruel cuts in social programs for the neediest, an upward redistribution of wealth to the rich, and an unprincipled conservative political campaign to demonize poor black mothers and their children have left latter-day D. W. Griffiths in the dust. Many of gangsta raps most vocal black critics (such as Tucker) fail to see how the alliances they forge with conservative white politicians such as Bennett and
184 | SONGS OF CELEBRATION
Dole are plagued with problems. Bennett and Dole have put up roadblocks to many legislative and political measures that would enhance the fortunes of the black poor they now claim in part to speak for. Their outcry resounds as crocodile tears from the corridors of power paved by bad faith.
Moreover, many of the same conservative politicians who support the attack on gangsta rap also attack black women (from Lani Guinier to welfare mothers), affirmative action, and the redrawing of voting districts to achieve parity for black voters. The war on gangsta rap diverts attention away from the more substantive threat posed to women and blacks by many conservative politicians, gangsta raps critics are keenly aware of the harmful effects that genre s misogyny can have on black teens. Ironically, such critics appear oblivious to how their rhetoric of absolute opposition to gangsta rap has been used to justify political attacks on poor black teens.
That doesn't mean that gratuitous violence and virulent misogyny should not be opposed. They must be identified and destroyed. I am wholly sympathetic, for instance, to sharp criticism of gangsta raps ruinous sexism and homophobia, though neither Dole, Bennett, nor Tucker have made much of the latter plague. "Fags" and "dykes" are prominent in the genres vocabulary of rage. Critics' failure to make this an issue only reinforces the inferior, invisible status of gay men and lesbians in mainstream and black cultural institutions. Homophobia is a vicious emotion and practice that links mainstream middle-class and black institutions to the vulgar expressions of gangsta rap. There seems to be an implicit agreement between gangsta rappers and political elites that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals basically deserve what they get.
But before we discard the genre, we should understand that gangsta rap often reaches higher than its ugliest, lowest common denominator. Misogyny, violence, materialism, and sexual transgression are not its exclusive domain. At its best, this music draws attention to complex dimensions of ghetto life ignored by many Americans. Of all the genres of hip-
Gangsta Rap and American Culture 185
hop—from socially conscious rap to black nationalist expres- sions, from pop to hardcore—gangsta rap has most aggres- sively narrated the pains and possibilities, the fantasies and fears, of poor black urban youth, gangsta rap is situated in the violent climes of postindustrial Los Angeles and its bordering cities. It draws its metaphoric capital in part from the mix of myth and murder that gave the Western frontier a dangerous appeal a century ago.
gangsta rap is largely an indictment of mainstream and bourgeois black institutions by young people who do not find conventional methods of addressing personal and social calamity useful. The leaders of those institutions often casti- gate the excessive and romanticized violence of this music without trying to understand what precipitated its rise in the first place. In so doing, they drive a greater wedge between themselves and the youth they so desperately want to help.
If Americans really want to strike at the heart of sexism and misogyny in our communities, shouldn't we take a closer look at one crucial source of these blights: religious institu- tions, including the synagogue, the temple, and the church? For instance, the central institution of black culture, the black church, which has given hope and inspiration to mil- lions of blacks, has also given us an embarrassing legacy of sexism and misogyny. Despite the great good it has achieved through a heroic tradition of emancipatory leadership, the black church continues to practice and justify ecclesiastical apartheid. More than 70 percent of black church members are female, yet they are generally excluded from the church's central station of power, the pulpit. And rarely are the few ordained female ministers elected pastors.
Yet black leaders, many of them ministers, excoriate rap- pers for their verbal sexual misconduct. It is difficult to listen to civil rights veterans deplore the hostile depiction of women in gangsta rap without mentioning the vicious sexism of the movements for racial liberation of the 1960s. And of course the problem persists in many civil rights organizations today.
186 SONGS OF CELEBRATION
Attacking figures like Snoop Doggy Dogg or Tupac Shakur—or the companies that record or distribute them— is an easy out. It allows scapegoating without sophisticated moral analysis and action. While these young black males become whipping boys for sexism and misogyny, the places in our culture where these ancient traditions are nurtured and rationalized—including religious and educational institutions and the nuclear family—remain immune to forceful and just criticism.
Corporate capitalism, mindless materialism, and pop cul- ture have surely helped unravel the moral fabric of our…
especially gangsta rap, by Senator Bob Dole, for-
mer Education Secretary William Bennett, and
political activist C. Delores Tucker, reveal the fury
that popular culture can evoke in a wide range of
commentators. As a thirty-five-year-old father of a
sixteen year-old son and as a professor and
ordained Baptist minister who grew up in
Detroit's treacherous inner city, I too am dis-
turbed by many elements of gangsta rap. But I'm
equally anguished by the way many critics have
used its artists as scapegoats. How can we avoid
the pitfall of unfairly attacking black youth for
problems that bewitched our culture long before
Gangsta Rap and American Culture
they gained prominence? First, we should understand what forces drove the emergence of rap. Second, we should place the debate about gangsta rap in the context of a much older debate about "negative" and "positive" black images. Finally, we should acknowledge that gangsta rap crudely exposes harmful beliefs and practices that are often maintained with deceptive civility in much of mainstream society, including many black communities.
If the fifteen-year evolution of hip-hop teaches us any- thing, it's that history is made in unexpected ways by unex- pected people with unexpected results. Rap is now safe from the perils of quick extinction predicted at its humble start. But its birth in the bitter belly of the 70s proved to be a Rosetta stone of black popular culture. Afros, "blunts," funk music, and carnal eruptions define a "back-in-the-day" hip-hop aesthetic. In reality, the severe 70s busted the economic boom of the '60s. The fallout was felt in restructured automobile industries and collapsed steel mills. It was extended in exported employment to foreign markets. Closer to home, there was the depletion of social services to reverse the material ruin of black life. Later, public spaces for black recreation were gutted by Reaganomics or violently transformed by lethal drug economies.
Hip-hop was born in these bleak conditions. Hip-hoppers joined pleasure and rage while turning the details of their dif- ficult lives into craft and capital. This is the world hip-hop would come to "represent": privileged persons speaking for less visible or vocal peers. At their best, rappers shape the tortuous twists of urban fate into lyrical elegies. They repre- sent lives swallowed by too little love or opportunity. They represent themselves and their peers with aggrandizing anthems that boast of their ingenuity and luck in surviving. The art of "representin'" that is much ballyhooed in hip-hop is the witness of those left to tell the afflicted s story.
As rap expands its vision and influence, its unfavorable ori- gins and its relentless quest to represent black youth are both
177
178 SONGS OF CELEBRATION
a consolation and challenge to hip-hoppers. They remind rappers that history is not merely the stuff of imperial dreams from above. It isn't just the sanitizing myths of those with political power. Representing history is within reach of those who seize the opportunity to speak for themselves, to repre- sent their own interests at all costs. Even raps largest con- troversies are about representation. Hip-hops attitudes toward women and gays continually jolt in the unvarnished malevolence they reveal. The sharp responses to rap s misog- yny and homophobia signify its central role in battles over the cultural representation of other beleaguered groups. This is particularly true of gangsta rap.
While gangsta rap takes the heat for a range of social mal- adies from urban violence to sexual misconduct, the roots of our racial misery remain buried beneath moralizing dis- course that is confused and sometimes dishonest. There's no doubt that gangsta rap is often sexist and that it reflects a vicious misogyny that has seized our nation with frightening intensity. It is doubly wounding for black women who are already beset by attacks from outside their communities to feel the thrust of musical daggers to their dignity from within. How painful it is for black women, many of whom have fought valiantly for black pride, to hear the dissonant chord of disdain carried in the angry epithet "bitch."
The link between the vulgar rhetorical traditions expressed in gangsta rap and the economic exploitation that dominates the marketplace is real. The circulation of brutal images of black men as sexual outlaws and black females as "'ho s" in many gangsta rap narratives mirrors ancient stereo- types of black sexual identity. Male and female bodies are turned into commodities. Black sexual desire is stripped of redemptive uses in relationships of great affection or love.
gangsta rappers, however, don't merely respond to the val- ues and visions of the marketplace; they help shape them as well. The ethic of consumption that pervades our culture cer- tainly supports the rapacious materialism shot through the
Gangsta Rap and American Culture 179
narratives of gangsta rap. Such an ethic, however, does not exhaust the literal or metaphoric purposes of material wealth in gangsta culture. The imagined and real uses of money to help one's friends, family, and neighborhood occupies a prominent spot in gangsta rap lyrics and lifestyles.
Equally troubling is the glamorization of violence and the romanticization of the culture of guns that pervades gangsta rap. The recent legal troubles of Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and other gangsta rappers chastens any defense of the genre based on simplistic claims that these artists are merely performing roles that are divorced from real life. Too often for gangsta rappers, life does indeed imi- tate and inform art.
But gangsta rappers aren't simply caving in to the pressure of racial stereotyping and its economic rewards in a music industry hungry to exploit their artistic imaginations. Accord- ing to this view, gangsta rappers are easily manipulated pawns in a chess game of material dominance where their consciences are sold to the highest bidder. Or else gangsta rappers are viewed as the black face of white desire to distort the beauty of black life. Some critics even suggest that white record executives discourage the production of "positive rap" and reinforce the desire for lewd expressions packaged as cultural and racial authenticity.
But such views are flawed. The street between black artists and record companies runs both ways. Even though black artists are often ripe for the picking—and thus suscep- tible to exploitation by white and black record labels—many of them are quite sophisticated about the politics of cultural representation. Many gangsta rappers helped to create the genres artistic rules. Further, they have figured out how to financially exploit sincere and sensational interest in "ghetto life." gangsta rap is no less legitimate because many "gangstas" turn out to be middle-class blacks faking home boy roots. This fact simply focuses attention on the genres essential constructedness, its literal artifice. Much of gangsta
180 SONGS OF CELEBRATION
rap makes voyeuristic whites and naive blacks think they're getting a slice of authentic ghetto life when in reality they're being served colorful exaggerations. That doesn't mean, how- ever, that the best of gangsta rappers don't provide com- pelling portraits of real social and economic suffering.
Critics of gangsta rap often ignore how hip-hop has been developed without the assistance of a majority of black com- munities. Even "positive" or "nation-conscious" rap was ini- tially spurned by those now calling for its revival in the face of gangsta rap s ascendancy. Long before white record exec- utives sought to exploit transgressive sexual behavior among blacks, many of us failed to lend support to politically moti- vated rap. For instance, when political rap group Public Enemy was at its artistic and popular height, most of the crit- ics of gangsta rap didn't insist on the group’s prominence in black cultural politics. Instead, Public Enemy and other con- scientious rappers were often viewed as controversial figures whose inflammatory racial rhetoric was cause for caution or alarm. In this light, the hue and cry directed against gangsta rap by the new defenders of "legitimate" hip-hop rings false.
Also, many critics of gangsta rap seek to curtail its artistic freedom to transgress boundaries defined by racial or sexual taboo. That's because the burden of representation falls heavily on what may be termed the race artist in a far differ- ent manner than the one I've described above. The race artist stands in for black communities. She represents mil- lions of blacks by substituting or sacrificing her desires and visions for the perceived desires and visions of the masses. Even when the race artist manages to maintain relative inde- pendence of vision, his or her work is overlaid with, and interpreted within, the social and political aspirations of blacks as a whole. Why? Because of the appalling lack of redeeming or nonstereotypical representations of black life that are permitted expression in our culture.
This situation makes it difficult for blacks to affirm the value of nontraditional or transgressive artistic expressions.
Gangsta Rap and American Culture 181
Instead of viewing such cultural products through critical eyes—seeing the good and the bad, the productive and destructive aspects of such art—many blacks tend to simply dismiss such work with hypercritical disdain. A suffocating standard of "legitimate" art is thus produced by the limited public availability of complex black art. Either art is seen as redemptive because it uplifts black culture and shatters stereotypical thinking about blacks, or it is seen as bad because it reinforces negative perceptions of black culture.
That is too narrow a measure for the brilliance and variety of black art and cultural imagination. Black folk should surely pay attention to how black art is perceived in our culture. We must be mindful of the social conditions that shape percep- tions of our cultural expressions and that stimulate the flour- ishing of one kind of art versus another. (After all, die-hard hip-hop fans have long criticized how gangsta rap is eagerly embraced by white record companies while "roots" hip-hop is grossly underfinanced.)
But black culture is too broad and intricate—its artistic manifestations too unpredictable and challenging—for us to be obsessed with how white folk view our culture through the lens of our art. And black life is too differentiated by class, sexual identity, gender, region, and nationality to fixate on "negative" or "positive" representations of black culture. Black culture is good and bad, uplifting and depressing, edi- fying and stifling. All of these features should be represented in our art, should find resonant voicing in the diverse tongues of black cultural expressions.
gangsta rappers are not the first to face the grueling dou- ble standards imposed on black artists. Throughout African-American history, creative personalities have sought to escape or enliven the role of race artist with varying degrees of success. The sharp machismo with which many gangsta rappers reject this office grates on the nerves of many traditionalists. Many critics argue that since gangsta rap is often the only means by which many white Americans come into
182
contact with black life, its pornographic representations and brutal stereotypes of black culture are especially harmful. The understandable but lamentable response of many critics is to condemn gangsta rap out of hand. They aim to suppress gangsta rap's troubling expressions rather than critically engage its artists and the provocative issues they address. Or the critics of gangsta rap use it for narrow political ends that fail to enlighten or better our common moral lives.
Tossing a moralizing /accuse at the entertainment indus- try may have boosted Bob Dole s standing in the polls over the short term. It did little, however, to clarify or correct the problems to which he has drawn dramatic attention. I'm in favor of changing the moral climate of our nation. I just don't believe that attacking movies, music, and their makers is very helpful. Besides, right-wing talk radio hosts wreak more havoc than a slew of violent films. They're the ones terrorist Timothy McVeigh was inspired by as he planned to bomb the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
A far more crucial task lies in getting at what's wrong with our culture and what it needs to get right. Nailing the obvi- ous is easy. That's why Dole, along with William Bennett and C. Delores Tucker, goes after popular culture, especially gangsta rap. And the recent attempts of figures like Tucker and Dionne Warwick, as well as national and local lawmak- ers, to censor gangsta rap or to outlaw its sale to minors are surely misguided. When I testified before the U.S. Senates Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, as well as the Pennsylva- nia House of Representatives, I tried to make this point while acknowledging the need to responsibly confront gangsta rap s problems. Censorship of gangsta rap cannot begin to solve the problems of poor black youth. Nor will it effectively cur- tail their consumption of music that is already circulated through dubbed tapes and without the benefit of significant airplay.
A crucial distinction needs to be made between censor- ship of gangsta rap and edifying expressions of civic respon-
Gangsta Rap and American Culture 183
sibility and community conscientiousness. The former seeks to prevent the sale of vulgar music that offends mainstream moral sensibilities by suppressing the First Amendment. The latter, however, is a more difficult but rewarding task. It seeks to oppose the expression of misogynistic and sexist senti- ments in hip-hop culture through protest and pamphleteer- ing, through community activism, and through boycotts and consciousness raising.
What Dole, Bennett, and Tucker shrink from helping us understand—and what all effective public moralists must address—is why this issue now? Dole's answer is that the loss of family values is caused by the moral corruption of popular culture, and therefore we should hold rap artists, Hollywood moguls, and record executives responsible for our moral chaos. Its hard to argue with Dole on the surface, but a gentle scratch reveals that both his analysis and answer are flawed.
Too often, "family values" is a code for a narrow view of how families work, who gets to count as a legitimate domes- tic unit, and consequently, what values are crucial to their livelihood. Research has shown that nostalgia for the family of the past, when father knew best, ignores the widespread problems of those times, including child abuse and misogyny. Romantic portrayals of the family on television and the big screen, anchored by the myth of the Benevolent Patriarch, hindered our culture from coming to grips with its ugly domestic problems.
To be sure, there have been severe assaults on American families and their values, but they have not come mainly from Hollywood, but from Washington with the dismantling of the Great Society. Cruel cuts in social programs for the neediest, an upward redistribution of wealth to the rich, and an unprincipled conservative political campaign to demonize poor black mothers and their children have left latter-day D. W. Griffiths in the dust. Many of gangsta raps most vocal black critics (such as Tucker) fail to see how the alliances they forge with conservative white politicians such as Bennett and
184 | SONGS OF CELEBRATION
Dole are plagued with problems. Bennett and Dole have put up roadblocks to many legislative and political measures that would enhance the fortunes of the black poor they now claim in part to speak for. Their outcry resounds as crocodile tears from the corridors of power paved by bad faith.
Moreover, many of the same conservative politicians who support the attack on gangsta rap also attack black women (from Lani Guinier to welfare mothers), affirmative action, and the redrawing of voting districts to achieve parity for black voters. The war on gangsta rap diverts attention away from the more substantive threat posed to women and blacks by many conservative politicians, gangsta raps critics are keenly aware of the harmful effects that genre s misogyny can have on black teens. Ironically, such critics appear oblivious to how their rhetoric of absolute opposition to gangsta rap has been used to justify political attacks on poor black teens.
That doesn't mean that gratuitous violence and virulent misogyny should not be opposed. They must be identified and destroyed. I am wholly sympathetic, for instance, to sharp criticism of gangsta raps ruinous sexism and homophobia, though neither Dole, Bennett, nor Tucker have made much of the latter plague. "Fags" and "dykes" are prominent in the genres vocabulary of rage. Critics' failure to make this an issue only reinforces the inferior, invisible status of gay men and lesbians in mainstream and black cultural institutions. Homophobia is a vicious emotion and practice that links mainstream middle-class and black institutions to the vulgar expressions of gangsta rap. There seems to be an implicit agreement between gangsta rappers and political elites that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals basically deserve what they get.
But before we discard the genre, we should understand that gangsta rap often reaches higher than its ugliest, lowest common denominator. Misogyny, violence, materialism, and sexual transgression are not its exclusive domain. At its best, this music draws attention to complex dimensions of ghetto life ignored by many Americans. Of all the genres of hip-
Gangsta Rap and American Culture 185
hop—from socially conscious rap to black nationalist expres- sions, from pop to hardcore—gangsta rap has most aggres- sively narrated the pains and possibilities, the fantasies and fears, of poor black urban youth, gangsta rap is situated in the violent climes of postindustrial Los Angeles and its bordering cities. It draws its metaphoric capital in part from the mix of myth and murder that gave the Western frontier a dangerous appeal a century ago.
gangsta rap is largely an indictment of mainstream and bourgeois black institutions by young people who do not find conventional methods of addressing personal and social calamity useful. The leaders of those institutions often casti- gate the excessive and romanticized violence of this music without trying to understand what precipitated its rise in the first place. In so doing, they drive a greater wedge between themselves and the youth they so desperately want to help.
If Americans really want to strike at the heart of sexism and misogyny in our communities, shouldn't we take a closer look at one crucial source of these blights: religious institu- tions, including the synagogue, the temple, and the church? For instance, the central institution of black culture, the black church, which has given hope and inspiration to mil- lions of blacks, has also given us an embarrassing legacy of sexism and misogyny. Despite the great good it has achieved through a heroic tradition of emancipatory leadership, the black church continues to practice and justify ecclesiastical apartheid. More than 70 percent of black church members are female, yet they are generally excluded from the church's central station of power, the pulpit. And rarely are the few ordained female ministers elected pastors.
Yet black leaders, many of them ministers, excoriate rap- pers for their verbal sexual misconduct. It is difficult to listen to civil rights veterans deplore the hostile depiction of women in gangsta rap without mentioning the vicious sexism of the movements for racial liberation of the 1960s. And of course the problem persists in many civil rights organizations today.
186 SONGS OF CELEBRATION
Attacking figures like Snoop Doggy Dogg or Tupac Shakur—or the companies that record or distribute them— is an easy out. It allows scapegoating without sophisticated moral analysis and action. While these young black males become whipping boys for sexism and misogyny, the places in our culture where these ancient traditions are nurtured and rationalized—including religious and educational institutions and the nuclear family—remain immune to forceful and just criticism.
Corporate capitalism, mindless materialism, and pop cul- ture have surely helped unravel the moral fabric of our…
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